Boy Scouts President Calls For End To Ban On Openly Gay Adult Leaders

The Boy Scouts of America will no longer seek to revoke the charters of chapters that accept gay adult leaders, the organization's president, Robert Gates, told its national leadership on Thursday. “The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained,” Gates said during the BSA's annual national meeting. The organization took no formal action on its current policy to ban gay adult leaders, but Gates said the group can no longer "ignore growing internal challenges to our current membership policy." “Nor can we ignore the social, political and juridicial changes taking place in our country – changes taking place at a pace over this past year no one anticipated,” he said. “We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”

RELATED: Gates served as Secretary of Defense during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. He retired in June 2011, shortly before the repeal of DADT took effect.